Sci-fi is especially popular with the young. As I got older, I became less interested in stories about space travel, and hence began reading less sci-fi and more of other forms of literature. But I never lost interest in the idea of alternative worlds. This is what makes Japan so interesting. It’s not so much that parts of Tokyo look very futuristic, rather that even Edo period Japan offered an alternative way of living, which was not obviously inferior to the West. Indeed as far back as 1700, Tokyo was the largest city in the world, with 1.2 million people and a very interesting culture.

Visiting Japan is the closest I’ll ever get to visiting an alternative world.

PS. In a recent post I made fun of the “cultural appropriation” insanity in America. The NYT has a new piece on that topic:

When the furor reached Asia, though, many seemed to be scratching their heads. Far from being critical of Ms. Daum, who is not Chinese, many people in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan proclaimed her choice of the traditional high-necked dress as a victory for Chinese culture.

“I am very proud to have our culture recognized by people in other countries,” said someone called Snail Trail, commenting on a post of the Utah episode by a popular account on WeChat, the messaging and social media platform, that had been read more than 100,000 times.

“It’s ridiculous to criticize this as cultural appropriation,” Zhou Yijun, a Hong Kong-based cultural commentator, said in a telephone interview. “From the perspective of a Chinese person, if a foreign woman wears a qipao and thinks she looks pretty, then why shouldn’t she wear it?”

If anything, the uproar surrounding Ms. Daum’s dress prompted many Chinese to reflect on examples of cultural appropriation in their own country.

“So does that mean when we celebrate Christmas and Halloween it’s also cultural appropriation?” asked one WeChat user, Larissa.

Good question. At least the Japanese and Chinese have not completely lost their minds.

PPS. Some commenters have questioned my credentials. I am having my personal doctor prepare a letter describing my competence. I can assure you that the letter will provide a glowing report as to my mental health.

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“But as traditionally marginalized audiences begin to find their collective voice, things that used to fly … don’t. In Isle of Dogs, Anderson sets his boy-and-his-pooch story in the fictional island of Megasaki, where a nation’s dogs have been exiled, left to fend for themselves. The conceit of this film is that all of the dogs speak English, and are voiced by actors including Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Liev Schreiber, Bryan Cranston and Scarlett Johansson. The overwhelming majority of the human characters are Japanese and they all speak in Japanese, which is conveyed to an English-speaking audience through subtitles or a translator or, sometimes, not translated at all.

Cinema is an empathy-injection mechanism. It maneuvers us, emotionally, so we can care about people who don’t exist, whom we have never and will never meet. The issue that surfaces in Isle of Dogs is whom are we being asked to empathize with?

We empathize with those we can understand. Literally. By placing the Japanese characters behind a wall of language, Isle of Dogs is placing its empathetic weight on the canine characters. Which are all voiced by white actors.

So when film critics like The Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang or culture writers like Mashable’s Angie Han wonder why Isle of Dogs needed to be set in Japan at all, as it doesn’t really ask us to care about Japanese people, they have a point. This is a story that could’ve been set in Iowa for all it cares about the humans. As much as it seems that Anderson does have a real fondness for Japan — and the story is co-credited to Japanese actor Kunichi Nomura — he treats the culture a bit like wallpaper, set behind his drama as opposed to an integral part of the drama itself.”

“Visiting Japan is the closest I’ll ever get to visiting an alternative world.”

In all fairness there are quite a number of alternative worlds still available right now. But often this plays out at the emotional level. The “feeling” of living in a European “latin” culture, or in an African country, or in the Arab world, is also quite radically different from the feeling of living in the US. I have lived in all of the above (never in Japan though) and it really feels quite different. It’s all in what people believe to be true (intrinsic values) and how they show emotion. The outwardly civilizational trappings, to me matter much less.

“But I never lost interest in the idea of alternative worlds. ”

There’s a lot of people out there that cannot imagine a world different from their own… in this way, even the “West” should more and more count as a “primitive” culture, of people knowing no other world than their own. Therefore they assume their own way of life is the only one possible, or at best, the only one defensible.

“I can assure you that the letter will provide a glowing report as to my mental health.”

Please show us. We’re waiting.

Yes; it was amazing that Edo period Japan had such strong cultural and other innovation and was so urban while being so closed off from the outside world. Shows isolationism isn’t all that bad if you’re isolating yourself from the right things.

” There’s a lot of people out there that cannot imagine a world different from their own… in this way, even the “West” should more and more count as a “primitive” culture, of people knowing no other world than their own. Therefore they assume their own way of life is the only one possible, or at best, the only one defensible. ”

Thank you for saying this. Completely agree.

Scott,

Two things. First,
” I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Mexico and China, and Japan seems far more “foreign” than either of those places. ”
A number of my friends and myself, who all grew up bilingual in Chinese and English (and a few of us also know Japanese), have this theory: The difference between Chinese and Japanese culture is far Far FAR larger than the difference between Chinese and US culture.

” Visiting Japan is the closest I’ll ever get to visiting an alternative world. ”
There is another way. It is far more difficult, requires a lot more time and effort, and, ultimately, far more courage. But you get to actually experience that alternate world as a, first rough, then later close approximation of a native. Learn the language.

To me, the most notable aspect of the cultural appropriation incident is the refusal of the young woman involved to back down in the face of all the SJW criticism. Of course, she is still in high school, not on a college campus. PC culture has expanded somewhat beyond college campuses, first to mainstream media and more recently to corporate boardrooms. It has not seemed to reach mainstream America yet though.

Interesting. Bolivia and the indigenous regions of Chiapas were by far the most foreign feeling places I’ve ever visited. I lived in Japan for a number of years, and was always surprised how easily I could fit in there. It was very different in some fundamental ways from the US, but it’s such a capitalistic, pro commerce culture that as an American I never felt very out of place. If you dig deep, the way Japanese society operates is quite different and ‘foreign’ but that never seemed obvious to me or in your face.

I live in Japan, just for restriction of light and network speed.
(FPS or TPS game lag. I need less than 20 to 30ms. )

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Welcome to a new blog on the endlessly perplexing problem of monetary policy. You’ll quickly notice that I am not a natural blogger, yet I feel compelled by recent events to give it a shot. Read more...

Bio

My name is Scott Sumner and I have taught economics at Bentley University for the past 27 years. I earned a BA in economics at Wisconsin and a PhD at Chicago. My research has been in the field of monetary economics, particularly the role of the gold standard in the Great Depression. I had just begun research on the relationship between cultural values and neoliberal reforms, when I got pulled back into monetary economics by the current crisis.